The Radeon Vega Frontier Edition 16GB Air Cooled Review

An interesting night of testing

Last night I did our first ever live benchmarking session using the just-arrived Radeon Vega Frontier Edition air-cooled graphics card. Purchased directly from a reseller, rather than being sampled by AMD, gave us the opportunity to testing for a new flagship product without an NDA in place to keep us silenced, so I thought it would be fun to the let the audience and community go along for the ride of a traditional benchmarking session. Though I didn’t get all of what I wanted done in that 4.5-hour window, it was great to see the interest and excitement for the product and the results that we were able to generate.

But to the point of the day – our review of the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition graphics card. Based on the latest flagship GPU architecture from AMD, the Radeon Vega FE card has a lot riding on its shoulders, despite not being aimed at gamers. It is the FIRST card to be released with Vega at its heart. It is the FIRST instance of HBM2 being utilized in a consumer graphics card. It is the FIRST in a new attempt from AMD to target the group of users between gamers and professional users (like NVIDIA has addressed with Titan previously). And, it is the FIRST to command as much attention and expectation for the future of a company, a product line, and a fan base.

Other than the architectural details that AMD gave us previously, we honestly haven’t been briefed on the performance expectations or the advancements in Vega that we should know about. The Vega FE products were released to the market with very little background, only well-spun turns of phrase emphasizing the value of the high performance and compatibility for creators. There has been no typical “tech day” for the media to learn fully about Vega and there were no samples from AMD to media or analysts (that I know of). Unperturbed by that, I purchased one (several actually, seeing which would show up first) and decided to do our testing.

On the following pages, you will see a collection of tests and benchmarks that range from 3DMark to The Witcher 3 to SPECviewperf to LuxMark, attempting to give as wide a viewpoint of the Vega FE product as I can in a rather short time window. The card is sexy (maybe the best looking I have yet seen), but will disappoint many on the gaming front. For professional users that are okay not having certified drivers, performance there is more likely to raise some impressed eyebrows.

Radeon Vega Frontier Edition Specifications

Through leaks and purposeful information dumps over the past couple of months, we already knew a lot about the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition card prior to the official sale date this week. But now with final specifications in hand, we can start to dissect what this card actually is.

Vega Frontier Edition

Titan Xp

GTX 1080 Ti

Titan X (Pascal)

GTX 1080

TITAN X

GTX 980

R9 Fury X

R9 Fury

GPU

Vega

GP102

GP102

GP102

GP104

GM200

GM204

Fiji XT

Fiji Pro

GPU Cores

4096

3840

3584

3584

2560

3072

2048

4096

3584

Base Clock

1382 MHz

1480 MHz

1480 MHz

1417 MHz

1607 MHz

1000 MHz

1126 MHz

1050 MHz

1000 MHz

Boost Clock

1600 MHz

1582 MHz

1582 MHz

1480 MHz

1733 MHz

1089 MHz

1216 MHz

-

-

Texture Units

?

224

224

224

160

192

128

256

224

ROP Units

64

96

88

96

64

96

64

64

64

Memory

16GB

12GB

11GB

12GB

8GB

12GB

4GB

4GB

4GB

Memory Clock

1890 MHz

11400 MHz

11000 MHz

10000 MHz

10000 MHz

7000 MHz

7000 MHz

1000 MHz

1000 MHz

Memory Interface

2048-bit HBM2

384-bit G5X

352-bit

384-bit G5X

256-bit G5X

384-bit

256-bit

4096-bit (HBM)

4096-bit (HBM)

Memory Bandwidth

483 GB/s

547.7 GB/s

484 GB/s

480 GB/s

320 GB/s

336 GB/s

224 GB/s

512 GB/s

512 GB/s

TDP

300 watts

250 watts

250 watts

250 watts

180 watts

250 watts

165 watts

275 watts

275 watts

Peak Compute

13.1 TFLOPS

12.0 TFLOPS

10.6 TFLOPS

10.1 TFLOPS

8.2 TFLOPS

6.14 TFLOPS

4.61 TFLOPS

8.60 TFLOPS

7.20 TFLOPS

Transistor Count

?

12.0B

12.0B

12.0B

7.2B

8.0B

5.2B

8.9B

8.9B

Process Tech

14nm

16nm

16nm

16nm

16nm

28nm

28nm

28nm

28nm

MSRP (current)

$999

$1200

$699

$1,200

$599

$999

$499

$649

$549

The Vega FE shares enough of a specification listing with the Fury X that it deserves special recognition. Both cards sport 4096 stream processors, 64 ROPs and 256 texture units. The Vega FE is running at much higher clock speeds (35-40% higher) and also upgrades to the next generation of high-bandwidth memory and quadruples capacity. Still, there will be plenty of comparisons between the two products, looking to measure IPC changes from the CUs (compute units) from Fiji to the NCUs built for Vega.

The Radeon Vega GPU

The clock speeds also see another shift this time around with the adoption of “typical” clock speeds. This is something that NVIDIA has been using for a few generations with the introduction of GPU Boost, and tells the consumer how high they should expect clocks to go in a nominal workload. Normally I would say a gaming workload, but since this card is supposedly for professional users and the like, I assume this applies across the board. So even though the GPU is rated at a “peak” clock rate of 1600 MHz, the “typical” clock rate is 1382 MHz. (As an early aside, I did NOT see 1600 MHz in any of my testing time with our Vega FE but did settle in a ~1440 MHz clock most of the time.)

The 13.1 TFLOPs of peak theoretical compute are impressive, beating out the best cards from NVIDIA including the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and the Titan Xp. How that translates into gaming or rendering power directly will be seen, but in general AMD cards tend to show higher peak rates for equal “real-world” performance.

Vega Frontier Edition will use a set of two stacks of HBM2, 8GB each, for a total graphics memory allotment of 16GB. Running at 1.89 GHz effective speeds, this gives us a total memory bandwidth of 483 GB/s, lower than the 512 GB/s of the Fury X and lower than the Titan Xp that is rated at 547 GB/s with its GDDR5X implementation.

Power consumption is rated at 300 watts for the air cooled card (that we are testing today) and 375 watts for the water cooled version. That variance is definitely raising some concerns as it would indicate that the air cooled version will be thermally limited in some capacity, allowing the water cooled version to run the GPU at a lower temp, hitting clock speeds closer to the peak 1600 MHz for longer periods.

The price of $999 for the model we are testing today (and $1499 for the water cooled option) plant the Vega FE firmly into the Titan realm. The Titan Xp currently sells from NVIDIA for $1200. Obviously for our testing we are going to be looking at much lower priced GeForce cards (GTX 1070 through the GTX 1080 Ti) but we are doing so purely as a way to gauge potential RX Vega performance.

The Gorgeous Radeon Vega Frontier Edition

Let’s talk about the card itself for a bit. I know that the design has been seen in renderings and at trade shows for a while, but in person, I have to say I am impressed. It will likely be a mixed bag – the color scheme is definitely not neutral and if you don’t appreciate the blue/yellow scheme then no amount of quality craftsmanship will make a difference.

The metal shroud and back plate have an excellent brushed metal texture and look to them and even the edges of the PCB are rounded. The fan color perfectly matches that of the blue hue of the card.

A yellow R logo cube rests on the back corner, illuminating the hardware in an elegant light. The top of the card features the Radeon branding with the same yellow backlight but I do wish the Vega logo on the face of the card did the same.

Even the display connector plate feels higher quality than other cards, with a coated metal finish. It features three full-size DisplayPort and a single HDMI port.

Above the dual 8-pin power connectors you’ll find a GPU Tach, a series of LEDs that increase as the GPU load goes up.

Though the look and style of a graphics card can only take you so far, and can only add so much to the value of a product that 99 times out of 100 ends up in a computer case, it is great to see AMD take such pride in this launch. I can only hope that that consumer variant sees as much attention paid to it.

Could be the reason why the 1070 is selling out everywhere but doubtful this article just posted. I'm going to say that this is probably due to premature drivers. Best case it will probably match the 1080ti just based on paper specs.

Canadian retailers are having sales. You can buy a Zotac GTX 1070 at Staples in Toronto for CA$550 + 13% tax, and a Zotax GTX 1080 at BestBuy.ca for CA$700 + tax. These prices seem very attractive, you could probably resell face-to-face for regular price. Radeon cards like RX 580 -- don't even hope, been "out of stock" for weeks.

The reason the 1070 is selling out, just like all the sold out GPUs is the fucking coin miners that are ruining gaming for us all.
Since all 470/480s, all 570/580s and all 1060 are now as rare a find as the damned Dodo bird, all the drooling morons have started the next cheepest gpu in line the 1080.
Hope this crap crashes hard, and hen we will have all the used gpus flood the market hopefully at rock bottom pricing.

Your kidding, right? Best case is that it gets a little closer to the 1080 from its current 1070~ish performance. It came in anywhere between 30% and 50% slower than the Ti, and no tweaks or drivers are going to close that gigantic gap. I'm always amused at how AMD fans think if they just wait long enough, their Honda Civics are going to morph into Ferraris.

To be fair the new Civic Type-R is a beast, even if it isn't a Ferrari...

At this point everything is speculation for RX Vega. We would all love for AMD to have a trump card when the consumer version drops. IT surely has the specs to compete with a 1080Ti, but we're comparing a prosumer version of the card that requires a switch to activate a consumer version to test games. Driver optimization not only provides performance, but it can also go the other way to limit resources to focus what the card was intended for. (Surely gaming was not a priority)

@Ryan Shrout
Hello i'm the guy who pleased you yesterday to do the triangle test. Thank you for test the triangle test.

If you watched the Video from you and the Video from David Kanter you will racognize that the Tiled Based Rasterizer at Vega isn't switched on. You should Ask AMD why they dont Switch on the main Feature of Vega ?

I was wondering yesterday about the Performance of wega and steaded that there "must be something horrible wrong with the rasterizer" ;) Maybe thats why the Frontier Edition is so slow.

So what resolution were you running? can I assume 4K or 1440. my was at 1080p.

This behavior in ist (Fury/Fiji) is different than the example provided in earlier AMD cards. I posed a question about this to David Canter in the comments section below the Video, months ago as well. I never received a reply. Not that I expected one, he is a busy man.

So what resolution were you running? can I assume 4K or 1440. my was at 1080p.

This behavior in ist (Fury/Fiji) is different than the example provided in earlier AMD cards. I posed a question about this to David Canter in the comments section below the Video, months ago as well. I never received a reply. Not that I expected one, he is a busy man.

I think the tiled based rasterizer is working on the Vega FE but AMD's implementation of this tech is diffrent then nvidia's implementation.

On nvidia side they try to upload all the triangles within a tile to the L2 cache (which explain the bigger size of the L2 cache in maxwell and pascal) to avoid going back and forth to the main memory (saving bandwidth and power). On the AMD side they try to draw one triangle in a tile manner whitch allows to draw efficiently.

This seems to be the way to follow to improve performance.
In this video Bill Daly (nvidia) explain how data transfer consumes energy.

This is interesting. this is not a proof of tile based rasterizer.
I
We need to see the behaviour of the rasterizer on the rx480 (or any polaris card) to get an idea.
I made a test on my gtx 1060. I wanted to see how the rasterizer handles the triangles so with 12 triangles it behaves like the video.https://picload.org/view/rpdwgcwr/tileat12triangles.png.html

so the tiled based rasterizer is technique to render all the pixel within a tile in a parallel fashion.
I think nvidia try to group the maximum of informations about the maximum of the triangles (the constraint is the L2 cache) and render theme at once, while amd (vega) render all the pixels within a tile in parallel but one triangle at once.

In the memory clock part of the table, you have Fury and Fury X's SDR clock rate listed, while you're using the quad pumped/DDR rate for the rest of them. Fury and Fury X's clock rate should be doubled in the table to remain consistent.

Well the Frontier Edition is targeted towards workstations, but still i was expecting better performance in gaming. If AMD wants to be more relevant in gaming market i hope they bring it bcuz people have been waiting and if they can't deliver, its gonna be a watershed moment for the entire enthusiast community. WE JUST WANT COMPETITION!!!

Well in fact in newer title non nvidia sponsored, AMD wins a bit in 1080/1440p res thx to brute force.
If testers wouldn't have tested the card in AMD sponsored title the win would be withing reach of the 1060 far more often.

In every graphs we can found, AMD lead by a small margin because of the total games benched, but not by much.

It means that with time, RX vega would be as powerful as GP104/102/106 ... just because it have the same performance as a stock 1080.

i believe to be more real world of a 1060/580, it needs to be tested on a more budget cpu. Something along the lines what those gpus will be paired with from both sides intel/amd. just to see what happen.s

Ryan, wasn't Fallout 4 giving strange(compared to other games) much higher performance numbers compared to those in this article? I didn't notice something in the "before you ask" page, or the page with Fallout 4 scores explaining that.

You might want to add this explanation somewhere in your article, because other sites had posted screenshots from the live and those Fallout 4 scores are used from many to base their arguments about bad drivers.
I am expecting this question to pop up again in the comments.

Another ryzen style release or just worse fury x clock for clock? Maybe we just need driver updates and game optimizations, maybe 1070-1080 is all we're going to get and maybe something between best case scenario (1080 ti+ after driver optimizations or just with rx vega) and worst case scenario (gtx "1070 ti"). I still have high hopes for rx vega, but if it fails to beat a 1080 overall, I'm probably sticking with nvidia.

Simple the JEDEC standard only deals with what is needed for the creation of one HBM/HBM2 die stack with GPU/CPU/Other processor makers able to decide to use from one to many HBM/HBM2 die stacks, depending on needs. Each Stack of HBM2, ditto for HBM, Supports only a 1024 bit interface(Subdivided into 8 128 bit channels) per die stack.

So one stack of HBM/HBM2 has a maximum bandwidth, with a stack of HBM2 memory supports twice the bandwidth per PIN: 1 GT(GigaTransfer/s) per pen for HBM, 2 GT(GigaTransfer/s) per pin for HBM2.

It looks like AMD did not need any more bandwidth above 512GB/s for Vega so AMD could go with two stacks of HBM2 and get around the same effective bandwidth with 2 stacks of HBM2 as 4 stacks of HBM. Also HBM2/HBM stacks do not have to be clocked at their maximum rating, so maybe AMD decided to go a little lower with its clocks on the HBM2 to save power, or have better error correction rates, or both.

But there is no sense in having more effective bandwith from your memory if you are never going to need it. AMD is probably making more use of compression anyways so until there is an need for the extra bandwidth in the hardware why have any unused bandwidth.

FROM Wikipedia:

" "The HBM DRAM is tightly coupled to the host compute die with a distributed interface. The interface is divided into independent channels. Each channel is completely independent of one another. Channels are not necessarily synchronous to each other. The HBM DRAM uses a wide-interface architecture to achieve high-speed, low-power operation. The HBM DRAM uses a 500 MHz differential clock CK_t/CK_c. Commands are registered at the rising edge of CK_t, CK_c. Each channel interface maintains a 128 bit data bus operating at DDR data rates. HBM supports transfer rates of 1 GT/s per pin (transferring 1 bit), yielding an overall package bandwidth of 128 GB/s.[10]

HBM 2[edit]

The second generation of High Bandwidth Memory, HBM 2, also specifies up to eight dies per stack and doubles pin transfer rates up to 2 GT/s. Retaining 1024-bit wide access, HBM2 is able to reach 256 GB/s memory bandwidth per package. The HBM2 spec allows up to 8 GB per package. HBM2 is predicted to be especially useful for performance sensitive consumer applications such as virtual reality.[11]

On January 19, 2016, Samsung announced early mass production of HBM2, at up to 4 GB per stack.[12][13] SK Hynix also announced availability of 4 GB stacks in August 2016.[14]

HBM 3[edit]

A third generation of High Bandwidth Memory, HBM 3, was announced in 2016.[15][16] HBM3 is expected to offer increased memory capacity, greater bandwidth, lower voltage, and lower costs. The increased density is expected to come from greater density per die and more die stacks per chip. Bandwidth is expected to be up to 512 GB/s. No release date has been announced, though Samsung expects volume production by 2020. " (1)

Stupid question:
What makes the titan series of cards an in-between for the geforce series and the quadro series is it only price? I mean it doesn't have the double precision performance that the og titan and titan black had. It doesn't have the pro drivers the quadro has. All I see is a slight cuda core increase and an extra 1gb of memory over the 1080ti. What does a titan xp do that a 1080ti doesn't? What is it that justify's the 500 dollar increase in price and makes it more then an expensive gaming card?

Marketing and early access.
A couple 100$ tax on gamers with deep pockets or poor researchers/hobbyists who dabble with deep learning etc.
Don't worry about it if you are neither. The only effect it would have on you is that the x80ti cards are delayed a bit.

Professional certified drivers and Quadro BIOSs that are certified for error free and accurate usage. That certification process costs millions of dollars over the costs for consumer gaming SKUs. Every professional software package has to undergo certification for the Quadro branded SKUs and that's a very expensive process, that and the error correcting hardware on the Quadro's coats extra $$$$$$ to certify for the error correcting hardware side of the Quadro branded SKUs.

You do not want some bridge structural engineering workloads run on anything other than the certified hadrware/dirver/BIOS professional grade GPUs like Quadros, Ditto for AMD's Radeon Pro WX branded(Formally called FirePro) Professional GPU SKUs! Ditto for needing the certified CPUs(Xeon, Epyc, Power) and the costly certified workstation motherboards/RDIMMs. It's that certification process that doubles/more than doubles the costs of the Quadro/Radeon Pro WX parts. And System Software/Driver engineeers and hardware engineers payrolls run in the millions of dollars over the millions of extra programming/hardware testing hours needed for certification.

If it's not Quadro or Radeon Pro "WX" then its not a real server/workstation part, it's a semi-pro part that can not be used for production workloads where lives are at stake.

These Titan XPs and Radeon Pro FEs are great for students to learn on but without the full blown certified Radeon Pro WX or Quadro Beanded SKUs you can not rely on them for actual production workloads where error free workloads are top priority.

Nothing now. When Titans using GK110 came out, they had the same double precision compute capability as the Quadro and Teslas using GK110.

Geforce had its DP removed from GK110. GK110 Quadros and Teslas had full ECC support from L1 cache and registers to all memory. Titan got rid of ECC and had 1/2 as much memory as the Quadro as well.

With GM200, and GP102 the Titan is no longer in between. Its just an overpriced Geforce. The GM200 is NOT the successor to GK110, even if they branded it as such. It was the predecessor of an entirely new line of chips with the code 102.

The Quadro and Tesla lines have also had corners cut because of Nvidia adding the 102 chip. Quadro x6000 is no longer the highest end Quadro, and is now the 102 chip.

GM200 and GP102 DO NOT support ECC in the GPU structures, only in their GDDR RAM, meaning the $6,000 P40 and P6000 dont fully support ECC. GM200 and GP102 also have no double precision cores so theyre useless for work that requires FP64.

Quadro P100 is the real successor to the ancient K6000. GP100 and V100 are the successors to GK110.

Nvidia differentiated their chip lineup from two main chips(100 and 104) into three(100, 102 and 104). In doing so,the highest end GPU from Nvidia is now $13,000 and not available in any consumer variant.

The fact that the Tile based Rasterized rendering is not working right now should improve performance by about 10% with rx vega along with another 10% possibly for driver improvements since FE is using a old Fiji driver right now from January. Expect around 15-20% improvement on RX Vega would be my guess along with better cooling and higher clock speeds.

My conversations with people smarter than me about this indicates that the rasterizer imapct will only affect high resolutions (4K+) and the difference would not be near 10%, even if it were the case. Instead, it is much more about efficiency.

It does seem to be more about power and memory efficiency than a kick up in performance. Like Ryan said, I would expect some improvements at much higher resolutions as there won't be as much memory pressure with the frame buffer and write out. I could be wrong here, but turning on tiled functionality won't suddenly make this a 10% faster card across the board.

Wanna know whats stupid? They vest the Vega FE against the 1080, 1080ti, and 1070 in gaming... How about test the Vega FE vs those cards in the work loads? Show us the scores. If you want to test a workload Vega FE in gaming I want to see the 1080ti and 1080 tested in workload situations... These reviews are asinine...

Apparently you haven't been paying much attention to the live stream that you were supposedly watching.

They did run Witcher 3 with the same settings with the fan using the default fan curve and with the fan at 100%.
Both times the clocks and performance remained the same, only the power consumption changed ( the weird drops to 240W from 280W )

Would be interesting to have some test comparing some of the machine learning frameworks amd released a new Radion Open Compute framework as well along side Vega FE this is focused on development and implementation of GPU compute tasks with better performance than OpenCL. They already support a collection of machine learning systems so they could be benchmarked comparing Vega FE and the Quadro and GP lines.

"The one caveat to this is that the Vega architecture itself is still unoptimized in the driver. But this would affect gaming and non-gaming workloads most of the time. So if the driver isn’t ready for ANYTHING, then that’s a valid concern, but it applies to ALL workloads and not just games."

this isnt true. gaming and pure compute tasks are different. all the fancy stuff they put in there to push polygons and stuff aren't going to be touched in compute. probably easier to support professional workloads than gaming.

Exactly, also in professional work loads its all over the place, sometimes really good but most preforms worse than the p4000 which it should beat, it'll be interesting to see what improved drivers can do as they have a lot of people working on it and its the biggest change since gcns release

Its a shame there are no workload tests that the HBMC cache would come into play all lots of pro tasks (in particular in the machine learning and rendering worlds) the input data for a given task is much much larger than the memory on the cards (in the TB) it would be really helpful for the story on this card to see how it performed in such a case compared to the other workstation cards.

Possibly an increasing test would be to set up a scene in a blender with some really large textures, subdivided the messes a load and put a noice displayment map, you can see the video memory needed to render in the top of blender if you can get this above the 16GB then it would let us see how turning HBC on and off performs.

Why are you testing a workstation card with focus on gaming. I know you made an attempt to answer this question with some reasoning that if Titan is a gaming/workstation hybrid then this card have to be the same.

The Titan brand have always been a hybrid but more importantly it have always been the top of the line card for Nvidia. It have always, with some exception between launches, outperformed its cheaper counterparts.

The Radeon Pro brand isn't the same thing. It have never been focused on gaming and AMD have never marketed it as such. Still, you ASSUME that it is. And I made the work "assume" capital here because this is an important word in the sense.

You got to the website for Titan and is says clearly that it is for gaming and it is the ultimate card for such. Titan is a gaming card that can do productivity on the side.

Now,you go to the website for Radeon Pro and Vega Frontier Edition and it says nothing about gaming until you scroll all the way down to finding drivers. It does however say just about everywhere how it can improve productivity in a workstation environment. It speaks about AI, medical applications, game design, graphics design and engineering - but not gaming. Radeon Pro is a workstation/productivity card that can do gaming on the side.

The distinction is important but is ignored by less knowledgeable sites who wish this card was AMD:s answer to Titan. They wish it so much that they assume it is even though there is little reason to make such an assumption. But it isn't, not by far. Fury was AMD:s answer to Titan.

In the same vein, if I take 13.1 tflops VEGA, but adjust it to actual frequency of 1440 instead of 1600, i.e. 11.8 tflops, and then apply 2/3 multiplier...

... I get 7.9 tflops ... while GTX 1080 has 8.2 and GTX 1070 has 5.9. And this is where VEGA roughly lands.

With so many proclaimed architectural improvements, there had to be potential to improve it, however. For example:
- Deferred rendering
- Use of shader array for geometry (where AMD historically lacked) - especially under DX11, this might be implementable so that it is transparent to the game, and then it must be absolute beast at tesselation
Does any of that work?

So you're saying to handicap it by comparing it to a sector that it's not supposed to be compared to? It's intended to rival the Quadro lineup, and that's quite clear based on benchmarks, and going to the official Frontier Edition page on AMD.

This is in no way a rival to a Titan or 1080ti, the scores show that, it cleans the Titan's clock in many various workstation applications, and the Titan cleans its clock in gaming applications, it tends to go neck and neck more with the P4000 and P5000 in performance, and actually is arguably a much better purchase than the P5000 due to costing half the price, and going neck and neck with it in various benchmarks.

That's like saying we should compare a 1080ti to an RX 560, sure they can both perform the same functions, but come on, they clearly have different intentions, and that's transparent. It's ignorant to say the two are in the same sector, as it is ignorant to say the FE doesn't belong with the P5000 and P4000, and as all the professional tier benchmarks has shown, it fights amazingly in those regions with it's price/perf, as where in gaming, it's an overpriced 1070.

So you're saying to handicap it by comparing it to a sector that it's not supposed to be compared to? It's intended to rival the Quadro lineup, and that's quite clear based on benchmarks, and going to the official Frontier Edition page on AMD.

This is in no way a rival to a Titan or 1080ti, the scores show that, it cleans the Titan's clock in many various workstation applications, and the Titan cleans its clock in gaming applications, it tends to go neck and neck more with the P4000 and P5000 in performance, and actually is arguably a much better purchase than the P5000 due to costing half the price, and going neck and neck with it in various benchmarks.

That's like saying we should compare a 1080ti to an RX 560, sure they can both perform the same functions, but come on, they clearly have different intentions, and that's transparent. It's ignorant to say the two are in the same sector, as it is ignorant to say the FE doesn't belong with the P5000 and P4000, and as all the professional tier benchmarks has shown, it fights amazingly in those regions with it's price/perf, as where in gaming, it's an overpriced 1070.

I have been watching A.I hardware for awhile and this new AMD Frontier Card intrigues me.

The issue that it is slow is that it is not using tile rasterizer and it is not hitting above 1400 on the GPU and the boost clock is 1600.

If the card had a 1600 clock/Better Drivers(including more optimizations/tile rasterizer turned on). I would say a 25% to 30% inprovement so it will be a little faster sometimes/a little slower sometimes than a 1080TI

I like the LED color control switch. There is a red setting and a blue setting. No green setting. I bet they're RGB LEDs. Can you imagine the meeting the decide that? "Why not green?" "Screw you, that's why!"

I don't disagree. However, it just wasn't necessary to show the performance levels of Vega FE. I did not originally plan to include GTX 1070 in my results. Only after I saw where Vega FE gaming results were sitting did I realize I had to include it.

Hopefully with Vega FE released to market there can be some development on the benchmarking/testing software front like some very very huge Billion Polygon mesh model scenes with debug testing on to measure how Vega FE manages that HBM2/CACHE via the HBCC and the GPUs entire cache subsystems and the moving data/textures/etc. between HBM2, regular DRAM and even SSD virtual paged GPU memory.

I'm very interested in knowing just how effectively Vega FE can manage very large 3D modeled scenes that are larger than the available HBM2/Cache's 16GB/whatever size of Video memory space. Hopefully Vega's HBCC can manage say swapping data/textures/GPU kernels into and out of that HBM2/Cache and allow for 3D scenes of sizes that are much larger than 16GB(Or whatever the HBM2 memory size is for various Vega SKUs. If Vaga can manage large amounts of data/textures swapped out to regular DDR4 DRAM of say 64GB and the HBCC can effectively manage the task of swapping between HBM2/cache and regular DRAM/paged GPU memory in the background then that will be great for 3D animated production workloads.

The Vega micro-arch has many new features over Polaris/older GCN micro-archs so that implies the usual development/optimization period after any new GPU micro-arch is released. Let the tweaking and testing begin because there is so much new IP to optimize for with Vega.

Is actually sad that most of the pages are about games.
-We have HBCC to see, but no. how it perform in that game?
-terabytes HBCC can see, lets figure out a way to see how it works. not now, we need to see how that other game runs.
-for a card that is made to creation let's see what rocm can do with this cards. rocm? what is it? we have to see this other game.
- lets put a bunch of cameras and see if this card can really handle. Nope, another game.
-ok, ok just put some sinthetic benchmark that anyone can do by themselves and call it a day.

I know most of the audiences is gamers, as you well put no problem in do that, but for god sake, for a professional stand point, do a review of the card for people that are really interest on the card and not in preview what a future rx card gonna perform, it's useless really.
a lot of new tech on this card like:
HBCC- find way to test at least 1 terabyte of virtual adress space.
NGC- 8bits(512 op per clock), 16bits(256 op per clock) and 32bits(128 op per clock) see if it scales, or its just bullS@it propaganda. since nvidia felt necessary to build the propper 8 bit processor, instead of use cuda.
next gen pixel engine- this kind of performance we want to see.
programable geometry pipeline- create a very complex mesh and see the performance of the thing.
and test the F@cking free sync 2.

I ask so much? Well maybe, but is all about the card, is actually what this card brings for godsake.

And before i forget, thank you to bring this game performance and some pro sinthetic performance benchmark, even much less than i expect i really apreciate.
Still waiting for a real review of the vegaFE card.

Thank you Ryan, i'm glad we are in the same page here. i'm wating for a full review and hoping AMD get out of the cave, and give some. It's us consumers, Interested in their product that claiming for God sake.

lol, ok you're right, even i thinking that my brain is more capable than that, well, maybe just a little.
i have to confess that i'm really Anxious. i'm waiting for this new arch for so long, you know...

sad to see DVI been phased out on some new cards, If they really want to reduce flexibility in ports I would prefer hdmi be ditched. I personally use DVI as my primary. I dont see the benefit of 3 display ports instead of say 2 display ports and a dual link dvi.

Before anyone asks why, well first off we all dont want to buy a new monitor to just use a GPU, is many capable screens out there without display ports, also my current monitor even tho has a display port has a nasty bug where the port gets stuck in sleep mode.

So if the frequency did not dip during the voltage drops in ROTR, did the FPS drop as well during those periods? If it can run the card at those freqs with lesser voltage, might that suggest some kind of bug with their voltage curves?

So you didn't use 100% maximum possible crazy settings in GTA-V. Anti-Aliasing (MSAA) at half, Post-Processing at high instead of ultra.. and didn't even show us what you had set in the advanced graphics setting.

Thanks for a shitty review. It's so hard to find people that actually run games 100% completely maxed out in all possible settings these days.

Great review Ryan. The results seem puzzling. The fact that the Vega product is not, at minimum, consistenly matching a GTX 1080 is worrisome. I'd be curious to see what AMD has to say about this in due course, and what they have to say at SIGGRAPH regarding the 'RX' variant.

The livestream was interesting too; fantastic to be able to see the benchmarking in progress and hear some of your input too. Thanks!

So you "overclocked" the card by increasing the offset and power limit, but didn't undervolt the card, so the clocks didn't even get to stock clocks. Now the 1080 and 1080ti tested, were they both fe or were they aftermarket cards, as thermals are definitely the limiting factor here.

everyone reading this article, please wait for gamers nexus's video/article, as thats where a valid and proper review of the card will be conducted (and the fact that this is still not a gaming card will be acknowledged)

At the same time, draw binning can occur using part of the TBR algorithm's side effects, so even less work can be done per draw, which leads to the draw completing faster, which leads to higher framerates.

How high it will go depends entirely on the GPUs ability to then keep the pipelines filled after an in-flight draw is canceled.

You might see 1% improvement or you might see 20% improvement (even though, technically, the geometry performance may have doubled)... but it won't be consistent.

You guys do realize that AMD has stated there is no performance DELTA between pro and gaming mode with this card, right?
This card's "gaming mode" is NOT even running Vega optimized drivers. AT ALL.
RX VEGA is launching july 30th/august for a reason. The drivers are not even finished.
This Vega card is running on old GCN drivers not optimized for Vega at all.
At the end of the day, this is a WORKSTATION video card. If You trolls and fanboys had any brains then you would ask yourself how come nobody is doing gaming benchmarks on nvidia quadro workstation cards and drawing conclusions on how well their gaming cards should do? No? cuz You're literally RETARDED.

For the Quadro testing did you use the latest drivers, or are the numbers for previous review? I remember as of GeForce 378.66 Driver and beyond, new OpenCL updates were added to the drivers. Might be the reason TitanXp scored pretty well in the OpenCL testing vs the Quadro cards.

With OpenCL tests for the high-end pro cards you need to find test cases the push the memory more than the raw compute power.

In particular for rendering when you consider most CGI scenes in production you are looking at multiple GB of VRAM needed normally exceeding that of the card itself so the performance of the cards io and caching is of critical importance.

It's highly likely that the gaming drivers are still the modified Fiji drivers that Vega was first shown gaming on.

It would certainly explain why the card behaves like an OC'd Fiji in gaming, and its observed tile based rendering pattern is identical to Fiji, despite Vega totally changing it. Also, the gigantic uplift in pro applications is not present in gaming.

I suspect when the RX drivers drop, this will be an extremely fast card in gaming. Perhaps faster overall than the 1080Ti or Xp.

I won't comment on the DX/OGL drivers but the Vulkan driver cannot be too old. Vega FE supports version 1.0.39 which only received driver support in April and is still the current release. This API version didn't exist yet at the time of demoing in December/January.

If it is true that they are using the Fiji code base with minimal changes at this point then i would expect significant improvements given this is the first AMD display driver chipset that supports packed math.

That means they will need to do a lot of adjustment to the Fiji driver code to make use of it but if they do they will be able to pack multiple operations into fewer clock cycles. This could bring a very big boost to performance if it is the case.

I observed that NVIDIA disable the geometry tile caching (introduced in Maxwell) on their Quadro card. My guess is that pro people like to throw a lot of triangle at the cards which would result in constant flushing of the tile cache once it's full.

My guess is that if AMD target this card for pro people, the geometry tile caching introduced in Vega is also disabled on that card. That could lead to significant performance improvements on the gamer variation of this card.

To test this theory, I would say run the gaming benchmark on a Quadro and a GeForce that use the same GPUs.

This said, geometry tile caching is phenomenal (see GeForce GTX 750 release a the time!) but I hardly imagine it's going to be enough to do significantly better than a GeForce GTX 1080.

Frame times are much more informative than FPS, FPS is always an AVG (over at min 1second)

But frame times are mutch better at showing if there visual stutters.

for example, if you have a 1 second period with 100fps and there are 5 frames that are slower than normal on the Avg you will not really notice since all 100frames rendered in the second but some were much much slower so you have a long 30ms game with no update on screen.